Post Office may resume court cases over branch shortfalls

The Post Office has recently explored resuming the practice of taking branch owner-operators to court, as mounting losses from shortfalls in its network of 11,500 outlets hit £12m a year.

- Mark Sweney

During the Horizon IT scandal more than 900 operators were wrongly prosecuted over discrepancies caused by the faulty accounting software, with many cases brought privately by the Post Office, a practice it stopped in 2015 and promised not to restart. However, the Post Office continued to use the court system for the civil recovery of losses from branches until 2018.

Since the damning high court judgments a year later, the state-owned company has only pursued losses if there was an agreement with the branch owner-operator, or assisted the police if the issue was of a scale that it could become a criminal case.